handicraftsman is dependent on your pleasure and opinion. He needs
your encouragement and he must have beautiful surroundings. Your
people love art but do not sufficiently honour the handicraftsman.
Of course, those millionaires who can pillage Europe for their
pleasure need have no care to encourage such; but I speak for those
whose desire for beautiful things is larger than their means. I
find that one great trouble all over is that your workmen are not
given to noble designs. You cannot be indifferent to this, because
Art is not something which you can take or leave. It is a
necessity of human life.

And what is the meaning of this beautiful decoration which we call
art? In the first place, it means value to the workman and it
means the pleasure which he must necessarily take in making a
beautiful thing. The mark of all good art is not that the thing
done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but
that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart. I
cannot impress the point too frequently that beautiful and rational
designs are necessary in all work. I did not imagine, until I went
into some of your simpler cities, that there was so much bad work
done. I found, where I went, bad wall-papers horribly designed,
and coloured carpets, and that old offender the horse-hair sofa,
whose stolid look of indifference is always so depressing. I found
meaningless chandeliers and machine-made furniture, generally of
rosewood, which creaked dismally under the weight of the ubiquitous
interviewer. I came across the small iron stove which they always
persist in decorating with machine-made ornaments, and which is as
great a bore as a wet day or any other particularly dreadful
institution. When unusual extravagance was indulged in, it was
garnished with two funeral urns.